In Search For Cures, Scientists Create Embryos That Are Both Animal And Human

NPR Rob Stein All Things Considered May 18th, 2016

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A handful of scientists around the United States are trying to do something that some people find disturbing: make embryos that are part human, part animal.

The researchers hope these embryos, known as chimeras, could eventually help save the lives of people with a wide range of diseases.

One way would be to use chimera embryos to create better animal models to study how human diseases …

Scientists are Conducting Experiments on Living Unborn Human Beings and Bragging About It

LifeSite News  BIOETHICS  Wesely Smith May 6, 2016

During the great embryonic stem cell research debate, promoters of an unlimited license to experiment promised that using nascent human life as research subjects would be limited to the first 14 days.

Until then, we were told, human embryos aren’t really human, just a “ball of cells”–pure junk biology. Well, if one wants to become truly reductionist, so are all of us.

During that era, I and …

Welcome to the CRISPR Zoo!

Nature  Sara Reardon 3/09/2016

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Timothy Doran’s 11-year-old daughter is allergic to eggs. And like about 2% of children worldwide who share the condition, she is unable to receive many routine vaccinations because they are produced using chicken eggs.

Doran, a molecular biologist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Geelong, Australia, thinks that he could solve this problem using the powerful gene-editing tool CRISPR–Cas9. Most egg allergies are caused by one of …

CRISPR: The New Tool in the Gene Editing Revolution Explained

ABC Science By Bernie Hobbs Updated 11 Apr 2016, 11:03pm

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A powerful new gene-editing technology called CRISPR has enormous potential to treat human diseases but the ability to tinker with genes can also be controversial. Here we explain what CRISPR is and how it works.

Since gene technology first emerged over 40 years ago we’ve seen a wealth of genetic advances — not least of all the decoding of the human genome in 2001.

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